News

01-09-2017 - Migrated Site to a new VersaWeb server

Issues with VersaWeb hosting began immediately. There was a 1-minute outage in the first 24 hours. As time went on, the 1-minute outages became more frequent (as many as 15 times per day!), and the screenshot capture failure rate increased dramatically (up from 1% to nearly 15%!!!). All signs pointed to connectivity and routing issues. VersaWeb was unable to determine any cause. So I spent many hours, over the course of weeks, to PROVE that there was a problem with their on-board NIC (network card), patch cable, or switch port. However, they refused to take my recommended troubleshooting suggestions and simply set up a new server for us (creating more work for me, of course). However, after migrating -AGAIN- to the new server; things are working much better now. The error rate is back down to less than 1% (which is the best that this particular screenshot capture script can do anyway*).

01-05-2017 - Additional Error Handling Added

To help mitigate some of the VersaWeb hosting issues and to troubleshoot further, I spent considerable time to separate out the general "Error" message into "URL Down", "URL Access Denied" (remote site is purposely blocking capture; they must fix), "BLANK Detected" (could be site down, forced download, forcefully closed page, or unsupported PDF format*), "URL Too Large" (maximum of 65,500 pixels supported by the capture script this site uses*), and "URL Blocked" (internal IPs, spam traps, and sinkholes), and the rest still returning a general error. Doing this helps users understand WHY a request failed in many cases.

12-18-2016 - Migrated Site to VersaWeb hosting

Due to the pricing structure of Amazon Cloud hosting and Web-Capture's heavy usage of bandwidth, the Amazon Cloud became cost-prohibitive. So, we migrated to VersaWeb to significantly reduce costs in order to keep this service 100% free for all users! ;)

08-15-2016 - Migrated Site to Amazon Cloud hosting

In an effort to get away from the terrible web host (LeaseWeb) that took over our previous web host, Ubiquity Hosting, I spent considerable time to migrate Web-Capture to the Amazon Cloud.

06-03-2016 - Added Support for "Lazy Loading" screenshot captures

Web-Capture now supports many types of "Lazy Loaded" images and divs. However, some types cannot be supported due to "bugs" with the capture technology used by this site. We have no practical way to overcome those "bugs" and do not plan to support them. Here is a list of various "Lazy Loading" script demos and example sites:

05-28-2016 - Updated Code to Output Much Higher Quality JPEG Images

My other screenshot sites both return high quality JPEG images, but when we took over web-capture.net; we noticed that the JPEG images were using the default 75% quality and were noticeably low quality in some cases. This was especially evident in capturing web pages with RED colors. After much investigation, I learned that the screenshot capture technology used by this site did not support anything other than 75% quality for JPEGs and there was no way to improve it. So, I took some painstaking efforts to upgrade the screenshot technology and code to get this working. Now, all JPEG images produced by Web-Capture are high-quality and utilize antialiasing as well. Comparing before and after really shows how much better the JPEG versions of screenshots look now. Enjoy!!

05-28-2016 - Translation Updates

Added Polish Translation: A very helpful and generous user from Poland offered to translate the site into Polish for us. Thank you, Radosław!!

05-22-2016 - Fixed UTF-8 Encoding Support

Ever since we migrated the site to the new server, captures with special UTF-8 language characters (such as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, and many more) were not working properly. This has been fixed.

05-17-2016 - Translation Updates

Added Russian Translation: The logs show that the second highest traffic visitor to this site speaks Russian, so we have decided to add native Russian translation to the site.

I just noticed that the main title, description, and keywords tags were not translated, so I made quite a few changes to support these as well and updated the translations.

05-16-2016 - Fixed Pinterest Sharing

It seems that pinning the captured image to Pinterest has been broken for quite some time also. Apparently, it was only possible to pin an image of the web-capture.net homepage, which is not what users want. So, I modified the output page to show a larger preview image, suitable for pinning and fixed it so that it would work.

05-16-2016 - UTF-8 BUG Fix (Support for UTF-8 Characters in URLs)

Apparently, the original creator of web-capture.net implemented some security that broke all UTF-8 characters in URLs. So those have not been working for years! Now, we have updated the security to account for the original issue, while still supporting UTF-8 characters. Enjoy!

05-13-2016 - Lots of Small Updates

Some of you may have noticed that requests for PDF, TIFF, PS, & SVG would show a broken preview image. That has been fixed for all types. Yay!

The system also did not properly return cached requests instantly and made users wait for new captures every time. That has been fixed. :)

The text status update colors made it hard to read, so I picked more complementary colors for each background.

I have added quite a bit of security to help prevent abuse and server attacks.

I cleaned up and optimized the back-end code of web-capture.net in order to make the site more efficient.

Among some minor tweaks to the system. I hope everyone enjoys the service! Ciao!

10-09-2014 - New version

New version for better handling of HTML5 sites.

14-04-2014 - Thumbnail

Show thumbnail at the end of the capture.

04-04-2014 - Donation

Add a donation button.

10-24-2013 - Done

The bug detected below is now resolved.

09-24-2013 - Oups!

We faced a small bug that prevent running any screenshot between 19h50 and 20h31 CEST, all is now fully operational. Yes we're still in BETA!
[EDIT] The problem is still there and tend to freeze the screenshots during high load. We're working on it.

09-19-2013 - Add email contact

You can now get in touch with us via email in case of capture failure, please don't abuse :)

09-18-2013 - https bug

A patch was applied that allows https links to be captured correctly.

09-17-2013 - Bookmarlet

Add a bookmarklet to ease and speed capturing web pages.

09-09-2013 - French interface

We got a lot of traffic from French people so we think a multi-lingual version of web-capture.net will help them.
Now available in French and English.

09-01-2013 - Site creation

Did you ever want to grab a copy of a full web page? For free?
Without downloading and installing anything? Now you can. Enjoy!